FTA:
Anthropic warned against “[t]he prospect of ruinous statutory damages—$150,000 times 5 million books”: that would mean $750 billion.
So part of their argument is actually that they stole so much that it would be impossible for them/anyone to pay restitution, therefore we should just let them off the hook.
Yeah, from that perspective this reads roughly like when the Zoom CEO started forcing his own people back into the office. Basically tells the market that your company has no real faith in the claims it makes about its products.